Hogback

Zara Raab

The blue Chevy with the windows down
is his idea of indoors, summers;
he has the cast of mind of hogback,
the temperament of coarse-grained basalt;
his stained, half-missing fingers fisted
over the wheel, he cusses, and pulls
the trigger on a harem of does,
(and misses) downwind in the tare grass,
then roars into third so’s to bypass
thinning pinewoods and ferret the coves
for three braces of pearly mollusk.
He’s a jack-of-all-trades. Come sundown
to the lit sawmill, he’ll strut around,
trimming the burl and burning the husks.

His new woman stands by the oven
of her gold-dun kitchen, baking rusks,
she has a mind of wide open fields,
at home in fescue, tare and chickweed.
Come Sundays, he jaws the venison,
she revs the Chevy’s V-8 engine,
or sights along a twenty-two:
She’s coming along, he says, none too soon.
This very morning she took her knapsack
to the blue-lupin pastures, loony
as a bluebird among the dobbins.
Any day now, she’ll mount the hogback,
track bucks with points on the knobby spine,
and shoot to kill, too, and not soften.

This poem first appeared in The Dark Horse (2011)